Re: My most expensive fuelling - ever

Gas turbines are great under load but terrible at idle, as there's less you can do with the gas generator section than you can with a piston engine to reduce fuel consumption at idle. Fine for aircraft or ships, of course, as you normally stay at one power setting for hours or days (less traffic lights at sea or in the air!). For a range extender that only gets used under load (turn on, charge batteries, turn off), that's not a huge issue. Integrate it with the sat nav so you only charge as much as you need to get to your destination, and it should be a lot of fun.

There isn't a huge difference in fuel between M1 and a challenger - 421 US gal (per wiki, quoting janes) in the challenger compared to 505 US gal per hunnicut.

Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

I think they are - I wonder if it would be viable to make a Stirling Engine based car?? All you would need is a heating element which could use any normal liquid fuel,and it could be use to generate electricity to run an electric motor.

Much lower fuel & volumetric efficiency than an internal combustion engine, so it'd probably be lighter to fit a diesel. You do get stirling engines on some submarines, as it's easier to make an air-independent heat source than an air-independent diesel engine, but they're generally low power installations

Re: My most expensive fuelling - ever

Originally Posted by Xlucine

Gas turbines are great under load but terrible at idle, as there's less you can do with the gas generator section than you can with a piston engine to reduce fuel consumption at idle. Fine for aircraft or ships, of course, as you normally stay at one power setting for hours or days (less traffic lights at sea or in the air!). For a range extender that only gets used under load (turn on, charge batteries, turn off), that's not a huge issue. Integrate it with the sat nav so you only charge as much as you need to get to your destination, and it should be a lot of fun.

There isn't a huge difference in fuel between M1 and a challenger - 421 US gal (per wiki, quoting janes) in the challenger compared to 505 US gal per hunnicut.

The range is greater on the Challenger 2 and Leopard 2. OTH,turbines do weigh less,are more compact and possibly have more flexibility with regards to what fuel is used.

Also a lot of ships seem to use combined gas and diesel propulsion systems - our Type23 frigates for example.

Re: My most expensive fuelling - ever

The T23 is CODLAG (Combined Diesel Electic And Gas. Normal propulsion I’d diesel electric for low noise emission (the diesel generators can be mounted high up and reliiently mounted) with a gas turbine clutched in to augment the electric drives whenspeed is more important than stealth.

The time taken to start a gas turbine for marine use is usually immaterial (a minute or so) but in a vehicle propulsion, you couldn’t shut it down or start it in an acceptable time.

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